Development of an integrated sustainable design approach for furniture design and its implementation and application perspectives

Abstract

With increasing demand in design, most of the industrial designers or engineering designers are facing the challenge to make timely sustainable design decisions in their design practices. For instance, designers have focused and efforts towards developing to determine the best conceptual design and demands for product design with environmental consciousness are a natural result of this trend. This PhD research aims to develop an industrial-feasible approach and tools for sustainability assessment in-process for designers in the furniture industry. The approach proposed seeks to optimize the product life cycle assessment through developing the sustainable design index (SDI). This built-in sustainable design automation which lead to comprehensive benefits of helping furniture designers directly communicate sustainability in their product design process and customers consider sustainability. In this research, it firstly begins with the overview and characterization of the sustainable furniture design. These are four key criteria as identified in this research, modular product architecture, re-configurability, using a design structure matrix (DSM) and axiomatic design (AD). The derived sustainable design index combines all these criteria into an integrated decision-making process, n ‘embedded’ integrating SDI algorithm within the CAD design environment, using built-in Visual Basic programming codes, tool to aid the design process while assessing the design sustainability as well. SDI represents, a novel methodology for integrating sustainability considerations into the design process and working within a computer aided design (CAD) environment with the designer’s interactive design interface (Graphical User Interface). To determine the relevant assessment criteria for sustainable design, preference analysis and analytical hierarchy process (AHP) were applied. It is which enables the industrial product designers to work with mainly the product’s sustainability performance strongly linking to the consumer’s satisfaction. The case studies further show the comprehensive and application perspectives of the SDI and associated tools, thus achieve the sustainable furniture design as the ultimate goal.